Exclusive: Blu-Ray’s conquered the HD format war, but its design and technical limitations mean the current format is as good as it’ll get. Sony says it’ll be the last optical format, after which, we’ll move way from shiny discs altogether.

See, it’s all down to the limitations of lasers and the discs themselves.

Speaking at IFA, Taka Miyama, Sony’s product strategy manager for home video marketing in Europe told us: “Blu-Ray is the final format for the optical disc. We don’t have a shorter laser. In the future, if we have a physical media format, it will change physically. It won’t look like an optical disc.”

That suggests we’ll move to a Flash-based medium, or maybe holographic storage, but Miyama’s not giving anything away.

“I don’t know what sort of technology we will have in the future,” he said, “but while using lasers and optical discs, this is the final format.”

However, Sony’s chief technical advisor for home audio and video, Eric Kingdon, explained that the Blu-Ray format is still a long way from reaching its full potential.

“I’ve seen prototypes for 400GB discs,” he said. “That’s approaching half a terabyte. If you went to 4K (twice the resolution of full HD), Blu-Ray is still big enough for a full movie. If it’s enough, then there’s no need to do any more development.”

So Blu-Ray won’t, or rather can’t, see an upgrade any time soon, and the next generation of home video might still use the Sony format.

What do you think? Can you imagine buying a movie on a flash drive, or will we have switched to high-speed downloads by the time Blu-Ray is out-dated?

I just don’t see any point in increasing resolution beyond 1080 for home use. The difference between 720p and 1080p on a standard 1080 resolution TV (say up to 50″) is barely noticable, if at all. There not a huge difference between the two even on a projector. Any future increase will be for a marketing/sales reason than for a worthwhile improvement.